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Reporting on Public Opinion Polls

Coleen Dickman
019:169 Public Opinion
29 October 2009
Reporting on Public Opinion Polls
Public Opinion polls can be a gift, or a curse. If a journalist is investigating a specific theory and finds a poll highlighting his/her investigation it can help the story incredibly. However, when reporting on polls there are a great deal of concerns. First, it is crucial that the journalist not succumbs to his/her desire for “breaking news” and over exaggerates the results. In many public opinion polls, the results aren’t as “shocking” or “unbelievable” as journalists claim. Often times, there are “dramatic graphs that grossly overstated the data which they were based” or “the tendency to grab for the biggest headline possible”. Other times journalists can misinterpret the data they receive, mislead their audience by leaving out crucial facts, or fail to include further background on the subject. Although there are a number of concerns surrounding public polls, it’s important to recognize their worth in media today.
In an article titled, Poll: Public losing trust in President Obama, Andy Barr reports on the data released in a poll taken by Public Strategies Inc./POLITICO. The poll asked respondents their opinion of several important policy issues, their approval rating of the government and Obama, and other current issues including the federal stimulus package and health care reform. This article is a good representation of accurate poll reporting for a number of reasons that were highlighted by Asher, Gawiser, and Witt. Initially, Barr starts the article by addressing who conducted the poll, in this case POLITICO, which is crucial to know because a biased poll has a much higher chance to misrepresent public opinion. Other background information Barr reports includes informing the audience about the poll itself, “The poll is based on 1,000 online surveys of registered voters conducted July 9-12 by Public Strategies Inc., a business advisory firm based in Austin, Texas, in conjunction with POLITICO, and has a 3.1 percentage point margin of error,” (Barr). This information alerts the reader to the dates that the survey took place which could explain if public opinion has changed since then, or if there was a specific event that could have influenced approval rating. In POLITICO’s instance, there was a great deal of concern and publicity over the economic downturn and federal stimulus packages. This time period would explain why there was further attention given to the poll results concerning economic issues. Barr capitalized on the public need for economic news and chose to expand on a question concerning a federal stimulus package. By picking what he deemed important, Barr was able to focus his article accurately without overwhelming the audience.
The article doesn’t flood the reader with irrelevant information, but instead selects pertinent figures to represent the poll as a whole. In other words, Barr reports that Obama’s approval rating relating to his “leadership on several key issues has fallen below 50 percent”. Rather than reporting public approval rating on all of the issues polled, Barr chose to highlight this statement by reporting on the single issue of health care reform. Barr wrote, “Just as Obama intensifies his efforts to fulfill a campaign promise and reach an agreement with Congress on health care reform, the number of Americans who say they trust the president has fallen from 66 percent to 54 percent. At the same time, the percentage of those who say they do not trust the president has jumped from 31 to 42.” Not only did he report the results of a specific issue, but he also was able to use other polls to compare the change in public opinion. This change is often most interesting in polling data and by reporting a change Barr inevitably expands his story to include a drop in Obama’s overall approval rating, “Obama’s personal approval rating has fallen below 60 percent in a number of recent major polls, and according to a Washington Post/ABC News survey out Monday.” Barr did not restrict his reporting to only one poll which is a mistake many journalists make. However, by including ABC’s results, Barr’s story is able to report another angle, adding to its degree of ‘newsworthiness’. Another important, but often overlooked factor in reporting polling data is using round numbers. Data is often given to the decimal point, but by rounding Barr gives the impression on more accurate data and distracts from the 3.1 margin of error that could be focused on.
Overall, Barr was able to accurately read the poll data without jumping to conclusions about making breaking news. He was able to manipulate the data to become more “user-friendly” and increase the readability of his article without losing supporting evidence. The most important conclusions made from the article can be attributed to the choices Barr made when selecting what poll results he was to use to represent his ideas. Therefore, the most important concept to understand regarding polling articles is not the specific results, but what the reporter is asking the reader to focus on. In the case of the POLITICO article, Barr chooses to highlight Obama’s drop in approval ratings and contributes this opinion to what he believes is most important, the economy. It’s important for the reader to acknowledge this fact because there may be multiple other reasons behind a change in ratings, but Barr chose to report his alongside the economic downturn.
(Article link: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25189.html)